Chase Sapphire Preferred Review
A powerful combination of bonus rewards, annual credits and travel perks.
Courtney Mihocik is a NACCC Certified Credit Counselor™ and a former senior editor for the Bankrate credit cards team. She specialized in helping people with limited or no credit understand their options for improving their credit scores. She focused on the subprime category and provided guidance to people on their credit-building journeys.
Courtney is passionate about creating a space where people can learn more about managing their personal finances, specifically helping her peers achieve their credit card and credit score goals. She believes that public education fails to teach the essentials of personal finance to students and wants to make up for it in her editorial work.
Previously, she led insurance content at Reviews.com and worked as the loans editor at The Simple Dollar, where she produced daily personal finance articles from founder Trent Hamm in addition to student, personal, business and bad credit loan articles. Before entering the digital media space, Courtney worked in hyper-local print journalism, covering arts, culture, food, news and more for publications in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Courtney graduated college with a 750 credit score, which quickly plummeted to the 500s when she nearly defaulted on her high student loan payments she couldn’t afford. After applying for an income-driven repayment plan and six years of careful budgeting, hustling and responsible credit use, she’s happy to report her credit score is back hovering around 720 and she can qualify for better financial products.
Achieving a good credit score takes time and patience. But as long as you pay bills on time and manage your credit wisely, you will watch your score climb. As someone who went from a 500 score to a 750 score, I can tell you it’s worth the effort.
— Courtney Mihocik, CCC
The Wells Fargo Platinum card is a no-frills option for consolidating and paying down your existing debt.
The Chase Slate Edge offers more long-term value than the legacy Slate as a low-interest card, but its intro and ongoing APR are easily outperformed.
As a starter card, the BankAmericard provides access to credit in a simplified way.
The OpenSky Secured Visa Credit Card can help you rebuild your credit or create credit from scratch. Plus, there's no credit check, so anyone can qualify. The downside is that there aren't many perks.
Learn how the OpenSky® Launch Secured Visa® Credit Card can help you build or rebuild your credit.
Compare the top prepaid credit cards and debit cards at Bankrate.com.
Citi's new Strata Card could be your next everyday spending travel card. Learn why in our Bankrate review.
Discover’s business card offers the same customer service and low-cost benefits as its other cards but also carries the same drawbacks.
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